Nolte, who earned an Oscar nomination for this role earlier in the week, plays Wade Whitehouse, an emotionally broken man who lives in the depressed New Hampshire town where he grew up. Divorced and aimless, he's haunted by memories of the violence inflicted by his alcoholic father (James Coburn, also an Oscar nominee).

The movie opens today at Bay Area theaters but has been playing in New York since December to qualify it for Oscar consideration.

The "affliction" in the story, which director Paul Schrader adapted from a novel by Russell Banks ("The Sweet Hereafter"), is the legacy of violence and Wade's inability to break a chain of abuse. It sounds dreary, but it is not.

Hotheaded and prone to outbursts, Wade hungers for love and redemption -- but can't escape his father's tyranny or the rage inside himself.

Nolte, who won the New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics awards for "Affliction," has never been better. He has played angry blue-collar men like Wade before, but never so heartbreakingly and never in material as deeply felt.

Rejected by his ex-wife (Mary Beth Hurt) and barely tolerated by his daughter (Brigid Tierney), Wade works as a police officer -- basically a traffic cop -- in the dreary town of Lawford and takes demeaning odd jobs to make ends meet. Only his girlfriend, Margie (Sissy Spacek), brings a semblance of order to his life.

When a local dies in a hunting accident, Wade suspects that his friend Jack (Jim True) was hired to kill the man. Eventually, it becomes clear that Wade's pursuit of this notion is just a distraction, a desperate way to avoid his own chaos and helplessness.

"Affliction" is narrated by Willem Dafoe as Nolte's brother, a Boston University professor who fled their hometown and father's influence, avoiding the family "affliction." Both men are still intimidated by their father, but it's Wade who stayed behind to pay the price of their inheritance.

There's a timeless feeling to "Affliction," an elemental quality that recalls biblical parables, Greek tragedy and the stark films of Ingmar Bergman.

Schrader, who was raised in Michigan by a strict Dutch Calvinist father -- he never saw a movie while growing up -- has covered this emotional terrain before in his screenplays for "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull."

There's something in Banks' cautionary tale, though, with its tragedy, its atavistic emotion and its urge for healing, that releases a new passion and urgency in the director's work. Schrader seems to understand these characters implicitly, and the result is probably the best film he has directed.

Nolte is the kind of actor who physicalizes a role so completely that his walk, his gestures, the way he sits and the way he listens tell as much about the character as the dialogue.

In an underwritten role that never makes clear why she would be with Wade, Spacek suggests a brave, lonely woman who long ago accepted the notion that life is not going to deliver what it promised.

And then there's Coburn, who at 70 shows facets of his talent never apparent in his earlier films. Old Pop Whitehouse is a horror of a man, cruel to his sons and neglectful of his wife, but instead of playing him as a one-dimensional bogeyman, Coburn takes that guy-out-for-fun leer that he's used in other roles, twists it a few degrees and suggests a man who enjoyed the power he had over people and never questioned his own authority.